• New and much improved rich text widget (based on TinyMCE)
• Awesome new data grid editor/builder
• Improved look and feel
• Much better stability, particularly on Macs and with large documents

You’ll find lots of other fixes and tweaks; it’s our biggest update yet. But you may wonder why it took nearly 5 months. Well, for me the central character in the story is Not Invented Here Syndrome.

Now, you’re probably all familiar with this nefarious malady that we developers suffer. In case any of you aren’t, it’s a term to describe reluctance to use technologies that were not developed in-house. There are a lot of justifications for it, and it doesn’t always cause problems, but what is important to consider is that if it bites you, it’s probably going to bite you twice.

What does that mean? Take the example of Mockery’s rich text editor control. When we started Mockery, we built what we thought was a robust and powerful editor. Why didn’t we use a free, open source, off-the-shelf solution? Well, the options we had were mostly web-based, and Mockery isn’t really a web app, and we were sure we could do a better job…and so on. At least part of the reasoning was (I’m sure) that it would be fun to write a WYSIWYG.

It was, and it wasn’t. But that doesn’t matter, because either way it was a lot of work. So we stuck it out, but eventually it became clear that we did not have the focus, resources, or motivation to compete with TinyMCE. The only answer that made sense was to bite the bullet and just use it. No big deal, right? We’ll just throw our stuff out and integrate the new stuff, no problem, right?

Unfortunately, we’d already painted ourselves into a bit of a corner with our own tool. It had features that no off-the-shelf system had, had a different input and output model, fired different events, accepted different commands…incorporating a 3rd party tool into an existing app is not an easy task.

The moral of the story is this: think very seriously about what you’re doing before you set about reimplementing anything non-trivial. You’re not just risking the time it takes to re-write what someone else already wrote; you’re risking the time it will then take you to integrate what you should have used in the first place.

I know I’ll be heeding this advice, and I know Mockery will be much better for it.

http://powazek.com/posts/2090

The gist is that SEO is not a valid field in and of itself and that good content will rise to the top naturally. Google works all on its own, and part of Google working is not requiring (or allowing) gaming by SEO goons.

Also of note is that traffic is increasingly driven by social media, which I have to imagine is harder to game as it is driven by real people. So the advice is doubly valuable there.

When it comes to getting the word out about, oh, a sweet new piece of software, that permanence is actually a really good thing. Every mention of Mockery builds upon the others, and we can see that reflected in the referring URLs. It’s pretty cool to see the word spreading.

You may have noticed that we’re pretty new to the magical world of marketing. Turns out it’s fun. Who knew?

I got a couple of comments in the thread and a couple more via email, and even one through UserVoice. Very nice, and big thanks to everyone who helped out with comments.

What’s the point? Well, if you’re a developer or have a startup, I strongly suggest that you post a link at the JOS boards. It’s been a pretty exciting day for me.